A wave of authoritarianism is sweeping the planet, tempting people to choose a dark path. It would be in our interest to know the traits of empires, so we can be alert to its dangers, to prevent and control its rise. Yet we are not taught to name the reality or to identify empire's basic traits. Thus, this work seeks to make clear the traits of the empire path. Then, this work wrestles with questions "Is there a good empire? Is a more utopian vision possible? And, if we are in an empire, how do we resist and build to a better future? We invite you to read this work to understand the flow of history and to gain hope that our world and its children can live in a richer, freer world.

The city states of the Lowlands have lived in peace for decades, bastions of civilization, prosperity and sophistication, protected by treaties, trade and a belief in the reasonable nature of their neighbors. But meanwhile, in far-off corners, the Wasp Empire has been devouring city after city with its highly trained armies, its machines, it killing Art . . . And now its hunger for conquest and war has become insatiable. Only the aging Stenwold Maker, spymaster, artificer and statesman, can see that the long days of peace are over. It falls upon his shoulders to open the eyes of his people, before a black-and-gold tide sweeps down over the Lowlands and burns away everything in its path. But first he must stop himself from becoming the Empire's latest victim.

This book addresses the apparent dislocation of the church and theology from the socio-cultural mainstream and attempts to recover its counterpolitical voice. It argues that early in ecclesiastical history, the tradition's founding and constituent principles were betrayed by a complicity with the prevailing politics of sovereignty that has continued to this day. Following the contours of contemporary theologians who explain the dislocation in terms of a fall in early modernity, an initial subsumption of transcendence by sovereignty is proposed. The genealogy of this fall is then explored in four historical studies focusing on the theopolitical transformations of law, violence, and appeasement from their beginnings in the writings of Eusebius of Caesarea to their culmination in the commodification of life itself. The trajectory is traced through seminal soteriological developments such as the crusade theology of Pope Innocent III, the inversion of the corpus verum and the corpus mysticum, and the conjunction of sovereignty and capital in the mysterious currency of the Bank of England. The narrative culminates in the seemingly paradoxical concurrence of the politics of biopower and the so-called century of the Holy Spirit. Drawing on a radical substratum intimated in the case studies, the final section develops an innovative christological configuration of kenosis or what is termed 'kenarchy.' This provides a re-imagining of the divine distinct from its implication with imperial sovereignty, which could allow theology to make a more effective contemporary political intervention.

Alwon's longing transports him into another world. In the realities of Over-world, This World, and the Netherworld, he encounters an array of archetypal beings. They include Beyonder, a Big-foot creature, which guides him on his voyage as his shadow side, for which he must find resolution. Alwon's last challenge is to discover his way out of a maze of caves which are the bodies of dragons. In the end, the resolution of his spirit journey depends on acceptance from unexpected help outside himself.

Modern society has a negative view of youth as a period of storm and stress, but at the same time cherishes the idea of eternal youth. How does this compare with ancient Roman society? Did a phase of youth exist there with its own characteristics? How was youth appreciated? This book studies the lives and the image of youngsters (around 15–25 years of age) in the Latin West and the Greek East in the Roman period. Boys and girls of all social classes come to the fore; their lives, public and private, are sketched with the help of a range of textual and documentary sources, while the authors also employ the results of recent neuropsychological research. The result is a highly readable and wide-ranging account of how the crucial transition between childhood and adulthood operated in the Roman world.

his work offers an alternative paradigm for viewing life and its dynamic capacity for change. Rather than focusing on the end result of evolution with concepts such as resilience and fitness, it focuses on the actual process of change, in which life goes through a fragile period. Using plain-spoken language and based on an earlier scholarly work, it examines six biological domains which exhibit fragility and make for evolutionary novelty. They are: 1) the organism's dynamic genome, which exhibits a remarkable fluidity; 2) Symbiosis, involving the creative merger of two types of organisms; 3) Sexuality, in which the merger of sexes produces unique offspring; 4) Multicellularity, which makes for most of earth's macroscopic life; 5) Development, change resulting from the fragile period of immaturity of organisms; 6) The principle of the "head", a holistic/controlling dimension of the organism which is inherently fragile and dynamic; 7) The social dimension with the fragility of cooperative and competitive interactions, and; 8) ecological dimension with its interwoven, delicate web of connections. To this we add a "cumulative dimension" which embraces a spirituality of biology. Teaching our youth and having the public become aware of such a model which focuses on the fragility and sacrificial dimension of dynamic change, would serve to enhance our personal lives and work to increase the chances for the earth and humanity's survival.